Krugman via Tristero

Says what many of us have been saying for sometime (and him too of course) but condenses it down to three paragraphs:

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; 'It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,' said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration's harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left - which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe - the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.

The loss in Vietnam has often reflexively been blamed on the liberal media (Walter Cronkite) and "the hippies" (oh, and Jane Fonda, don't forget Jane Fonda), rather than the more accurate story that it was a ill-thought out policy enacted and implemented on a falsehood.

Sound familiar?

Iraq is already being explained the same way, it looks like Afghanistan, while lacking the false basis for being undertaken, is facing yet another instance of the west doing a half-assed job and abandoning it to its fate, making Karzai the "Mayor of Kabul" only the way that the South Vietnamese junta came to firmly hold only Saigon.

But hey there is always Iran, third time's a charm!